Ken Plummer,editor

Many of the relationships described in this special issue, put together to honour the work of Ken Plummer, focus on Essex connections, intergenerational friendships, or particular intellectual concerns such as symbolic interactionism or citizenship. Unlike these, my relationship with Ken has largely been through this journal, Sexualities. As an early career academic one of the first pieces I wrote was published in Sexualities. At the time I did not see myself as a Sexualities researcher, though I knew and admired Ken’s work of course. As my interest in writing about sex and media developed, his work on stigma and identity provided interesting places from which to think. Ken’s devotion to opening up new kinds of critical study that went beyond disciplinary boundaries was immensely productive. I can’t emphasize enough how much of a difference it has made that scholars of Ken’s stature were prepared to work like this; to think in this big and generous way about developing a whole field of study beyond their own immediate areas of interest.

I have found many more reasons to celebrate Ken’s work since then. His work on stories connected really helpfully with the developing interest in media and cultural studies around the important connections between representation and self-presentation. His discussion of citizenship has been vital in suggesting how to frame sexual ethics in ways that go beyond moralism, pathologizing approaches or the politics of respectability. His work on intimacies laid a foundation for work in contemporary media studies where ‘digital intimacies’ has become a major new focus. His courage in pursuing difficult and controversial topics has been inspiring for sexualities research – an area which continues to be difficult and dangerous for academics in terms of their career development and reputation.

As a bonus, publishing in Sexualities was a pleasure – this hadn’t been my experience elsewhere – Ken and Agnes were so friendly and easy to work with. I loved Ken’s notes on what to check before you submitted – before the days when the submission process was automated and centralised – which ended with a cheery ‘well, then if you’ve done all of this, you’re wonderful!’ The experience made me interested in working on journals and this has turned out to be a really important part of my working life.

It is fascinating to read Ken’s reflections on Sexualities over the years. Here he is (Plummer, 2013) looking back at the original proposal he submitted in 1995, a ‘truly exciting moment’, with Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society, to give the journal its full title, intended ‘to publish the widest range of the new “critical–empirical–theoretical–cultural–historical–sociological” work’ which Ken was to name ‘Critical Sexualities Studies’ (see Plummer, 2012), and which he planned would include contributions on:

New technologies… cybersex, telephone sex, virtual reality, and the links to masturbation, safer sex and the like…Landscapes and spaces of sexualities…the ‘spaces’ of sex in the cities throughout the world…Class and Sex...and race…the shifting nature of same-sex experiences across the world, and…its politics…sexualities (and) debates over reproduction/abortion/changing patterns of fertility…new communities and …new identities (bisexual identities…fetishist communities’…‘heterosexual identity’… male-based erotic settings such as the gay bathhouse…Articles from all round the world (especially when they) directly confront issues of globalization and the intermingling of different cultures…all kinds of media and how they represent sexualities…cultural histories of different kinds of audiences and their consumption of sexualities...prostitution/sex work (old and new forms of, in different countries of the world, male and female, etc.) and the rise of sex tourism with its links to globalization…the nature of childhood sexualities in different settings…child sexual abuse, paedophilia and its organization, social gerontology and sexual experience of the elderly, moral campaigns around childhood sexuality…perversions! ...the full range of sexual experiences from fetishes to aspects of SM…solo sex/masturbation…Ethnographies of Sexuality…Debates and controversies in all the areas of sexual politics…all issues concerning the ways in which sexualities are socially organized through health issues…classic contributions…and new ones.

This gleeful enumerating of the topics that might come out of critical sexualities studies shows the balance that has been in play throughout Ken’s development of our field, suggesting a playful relationship which is also extremely serious, and a commitment to starting something off, predicting with some confidence where it might go but not trying to control or constrain it.

Twenty years after the launch of the journal (Plummer, 2018), here is Ken listing some of the content covered by Sexualities so far:

…Pornographies and erotica; sex work, sex industry and prostitution; commercial sex and sex entertainment; mediated sex; sado-masochism; cyber sexualities, internet and digital sexualities; heterosexuality; male rape, female rape, sexual violence and anti-rape education; female exhibitionism; HIV and sexual health; masturbation, intercourse, anal intercourse, fellatio, orgasm; dogging; bare backing; hints of pederasty and paedophilia; men/women/masculinity/femi- ninity/ transgender/trans-women; inter-sexuality; the sexualities of the young and the old; married sex and single sex; sex tourism; sex education; strippers – men and women – and ‘exotic dance’; pregnant bodies and sexuality; city sex and rural sex; bisexualities and poly-amory; Viagra; lesbian, gay and queer studies; circumcision; children’s sex books; migration; couples, gay and lesbian marriages; sluts; sexual dysfunction; bodies; cosmetic surgery; interracial intimacy; teenage mothers; contraception; celibacy; corporal punishment, professional wrestling and drag, fantasy, social movements around gender and sexuality; sexual politics, sexual citizenship, sexual meanings, sexuality and nationalism, sex hormones, safe spaces, post-modern sexualities, and sexualities in the primary school.

Ken was eagle eyed about the developing body of work in Sexualities, celebrating its breadth and detail, but aware too of gaps and shortcomings; in the same article he outlines some of these – the need to return to the study of material and social inequalities, to develop studies of the life cycle – and particularly of older people and the very young, to trace the interpenetration of cultures around the globe, to keep up with the fast developing world of cyber-sexualities, to consider solo sex and to think about how we might apply new theoretical developments elsewhere to sexualities research.

Ken’s overviews offer a brilliant and illuminating map of how our field has developed over a period of what is nearly 30 years now and a good guide to what has been gained, what remains undeveloped, what is new and original, what is missing, the promise and pleasures and dangers of our work. Here is Ken in 2018, noting that ‘issues that were a little cutting edge 20 years ago have now become orthodoxies’ and that nearly all the areas he originally listed in his proposal have become specialisms in their own right. By now new bodies that had come into existence – The European Sociological Association Sexualities Research Network in 2008; the first Sexualities conference of The American Sociological Association in 2015 – and there were many new sexualities journals. Throughout the period, he notes, Sexualities had become ‘a smörgåsbord of deliciously different concerns’ with ‘a cornucopia of ideas, research and practices abuzz’, that ‘fragmented into a thousand blooms across the world’.

By now too, articles were ‘arriving from many countries: Hungary, Spain, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Japan, South Africa, the Gambia, Cuba, Trinidad, South Korea, China, Poland, Mexico, Iran, Hong Kong, Argentina, Turkey’. And yet the journal, based in a western intellectual movement, was not only working as a dynamic force for analysis, but also displaying a tendency to ‘take over other countries’. But for all its gaps and shortcomings, Sexualities under Ken’s direction has kept a clear sense of its place - not scientific or pathologising, not narrow, above all always ‘critical’. It has, and continues to be, a really important place for the development of writing on sexualities, refusing trends which often are masks for normalisation and respectability.

Academic journals get a bad press. Academic publishing makes a lot of money, very little of it feeding back to academics and their research. Academics complain, rightly, about the unpaid labour they contribute to the reviewing and administrative work of journals. Journals, locked behind paywalls, are – again, rightly, criticised for restricting access to knowledge, and as Ken noted, increasingly taken over by new management systems (in Stein and Kong, 2023). Academic institutions pay lip service to the importance of journals but often do little to support them - they do not represent grant capture or the kind of individual or institutional recognition that is now valued, there’s nothing big and glossy or headline worthy about them, they don’t relate in an obvious way to the interests of their fee-paying students. And yet journals, for all this, are vital. These are the spaces where new areas of work often begin, where new communities of scholars gather and begin to stake out their territory, where they find their academic families. They are, perhaps more than anywhere else, the spaces where scholars can hone their craft and – for all the vitriol heaped on the hated ‘reviewer 2’ – dramatically improve and develop their work.

In his conversation with Stein and Kong, (2023), published in this issue and taking place not long before his death, Ken claimed that he was ‘never really quite a proper academic’, that despite his love of ‘doing intellectual things’ he hated ‘the pomposity, the pretentiousness, the rigidity, the falsity even of some academia; the way people, you know, turn something mundane into something really big and fancy’. This lack of interest in the ‘big and fancy’ and his insistence on useful work – evident also in his authoring of textbooks, has fuelled and sustained his work as editor of Sexualities, often, despite its important achievement, a mundane process. In 2008 he wrote about the ‘ho hum nature’ of journal editing:

Busy as an editor, there is not much time to reflect back on what’s been published and what’s been achieved…At one level, like all work, it is a bit humdrum. And each issue, from my chair, looks much like the others. It is an important task: getting new ideas and new studies out there, helping careers move along a little, maybe in an oh-too-grandiose moment thinking it is adding a bit to humanity’s lot in some very, very small way.

What I find so impressive about Ken is his willingness to go beyond his own areas of interest, his generosity in devoting energy to shaping the field of ‘changing worlds of human sexualities’ (Plummer, 2018) and his cheerful shouldering of the ‘ho hum’ work of editing. Ken had the wisdom and the humility to see all these elements of academic work – specialist study, commitment to developing the field and time devoted to service – as important in their own ways, and vital to what he valued above all else – the ‘search for a better world for all, not just the few. A world of care, compassion and love; alongside a world of social justice and cosmopolitan politics’ (2018).